That Summer (13 page)

“Oh.” He nodded but didn’t say anything right away. “That’s tough.”

“It’s only ’cause of the divorce and Ashley moving out,” I said. “Just the two of us now, and all that. I don’t know. Things have been so nuts lately.”

“Yeah,” he said. “When my parents got divorced it was really ugly. Everyone was fighting and I couldn’t deal with it. I just packed up my car and took off. I didn’t even know where I was going.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know ... eighteen? It was the summer before I went to college. I just traveled around doing my thing, and by the time I got back everything had calmed down a little bit. And then I went off to college.”

“I wish I could go somewhere,” I said.

“I know what you mean. Sometimes, it just gets to be too much.” Then he added, “Did you tell Ashley you saw me?”

“Yeah.” I still had my mother on my mind, the house and the move and Europe all jumbled, and suddenly here Ashley was, the center of attention again. “I told her.”

“What’d she say?”

I looked at him, wondering what was at stake here, then said, “She didn’t say much. She’s got a lot on her mind now.”

“Oh, yeah.” He shrugged it off. “Well, sure. I just wondered if she remembered me, you know. If she ran screaming from the room at the mention of my name.”

“Nothing that dramatic,” I said. “She just ... she said to say hello if I saw you again.”

“Really?” He was surprised. “Wow.”

“I mean, it was casual and all,” I said quickly, worried that this little lie might carry more weight than I meant it to. I couldn’t tell him how she’d hardly blinked, hanging over the porch with her hair shielding her face. How it had barely jarred her mind from the wedding and Lewis and even the smallest thought she might have been thinking. No one wants to be inconsequential.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “I just wondered if she even remembered me.”

“She does,” I said as we came up on Little Feet, with sneakers bobbing on fishing line in the window and paper fish I’d made myself stuck to the wall behind them. “You’re not so forgettable.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t know about that.” He stopped at the door to the store, sweeping his arm. “And here we are.”

“Yeah.” I looked in to see my manager folding socks. When he saw me he took a not so subtle look at the clock, craning his long, rubbery neck. I hated my job. “You know you could always drop in at Dillard’s and see her. She works at the Vive cosmetics counter.”

He smiled. “I don’t think that’s such a great idea. There’s no telling what might happen when she saw me.”

My manager was watching me, folding sock over sock. “You could at least say hello. I mean, it wasn’t like you ever did anything to her.”

Sumner looked up. He stared at me as if my face was changing before him, and then said slowly, “Well, no. I guess not. Look, I better go, Haven. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Me too.” I pulled out my name tag and put it on, fastening the clip. “Think about it, Sumner. It’s not like she ever hated you.” I didn’t know why this was so important to me; maybe I thought he could bring back the Ashley I liked so much, the one who liked me. Maybe Sumner’s magic could work on both of us again.

He started to back away, hands in his pockets. He looked smaller to me now, lost in the green of his uniform. “Yeah. I’ll see you later.”

I stood there and watched him walk away, still stalling for time while the second hand of the store clock jumped closer and closer to two o’clock. The mall was noisy and busy now, with people and voices and colors all jumbled together, another Saturday of shopping and families and bright red plastic Lakewood Mall bags. Still I kept my eye on Sumner as he waded through the throngs past the potted plants and swaying banners overhead. He’d been where I was, once; he understood. I watched him go until he was lost to me, another green in a sea of multicolors, shifting.

Chapter Eight

In the time that she’d been home, Casey had managed not only to be grounded for smoking, but also to get caught making hour-long interstate calls to Pennsylvania, drinking a beer behind the garden shed during a family barbecue, and disappearing for an entire day. Mrs. Melvin was exhausted and sick of Casey’s face, so she granted her a leave of two hours to come to see me, provided she called in every half hour and got home by six. She arrived two seconds after inviting herself over, breathless.

“My mom wants to kill me,” she said as we set out for a walk around the neighborhood and a chance to talk in private. “I heard her and my dad discussing my situation last night, on the back porch.”

“And she said she wanted to kill you?”

“No, she said she was beginning to think the only solution was to lock me in my room.” She pushed a mass of orange curls out of her face. “But then she lets me out today. I think she’s up to something.”

“You’re paranoid,” I told her.

“Last night when I called Rick he said he was getting it from his parents, too. He can’t call for a while.” She sighed, crossing her arms against her shirt, a long white polo ten sizes too big. I wondered if Rick had any clothes of his own left. I imagined him leaving 4-H camp naked, with Casey packing up everything he owned as a souvenir.

“It’s only till Thanksgiving,” I said, trying to be helpful. It hadn’t happened to me yet, this swirling mass of emotions that made all the women around me behave so erratically.

“Thanksgiving is forever away,” she whined as we took the corner and headed down the street parallel to our own. “I’m going nuts here and it’s been less than a week. I’ve got to find some way to get up there.”

“Get up where?”

She rolled her eyes. “Pennsylvania. God, Haven, aren’t you paying attention?”

“Not when you start talking like a crazy person. You don’t even drive yet.”

“I will, in two and a half weeks.” With the wedding so close, I’d forgotten her birthday was coming up. “Dad’s been taking me out every night to drive around and I know they’re going to give me my grandmother’s Delta 88. They think it’s a secret and I don’t know why it’s in the garage, but I know.”

“Even if you are about to get your license,” I said as a mass of kids on bikes passed us, all of them in helmets and knee pads, little punks terrorizing the neighborhood, “they’d never let you take off to Pennsylvania.”

“Of course they wouldn’t let me.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if I was slow and just not getting it. Since Casey had gone wild at 4-H camp, it seemed like we had less and less in common. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t go. I just slip out, see, in the middle of the night, and call them the next morning when I’m in, like, Maryland. By then they’re just so crazed with worry they’re just happy I’m alive, so they let me go on. Then I come back and get punished forever but it’s worth it because I get to be with Rick.”

I looked at her. “That will never work.”

She stuck out her bottom lip, something she’d gotten good at in the last week, and said, “Yes it will.”

“Oh, like Rick’s parents wouldn’t send you home the second you showed up. They’re not going to let you just hang out while your parents are sitting around here waiting for you to get home so they can kill you.”

She was staring at the sidewalk as I said this, making a point of not looking at me. After a minute she said in a tight voice, “You don’t understand, Haven. You couldn’t. You’ve never been in love.”

“Oh please,” I said, suddenly fed up. I was sick of hearing about Rick and Pennsylvania and camp stories. I couldn’t talk to anyone anymore. Sumner seemed like the only one who listened at all, the only one who asked for nothing and took nothing from me.

“You know what your problem is,” Casey began, her hand poised to shake at me, but then she stopped dead, sucking in her breath. She grabbed my shirt, tugging, and pointed across one of the yards.

It was Gwendolyn Rogers. Or at least the back of Gwendolyn Rogers. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and she was wearing a black string bikini top, standing there in the backyard all by herself. She had her hands on her hips and was staring off across the yard, over the wall and into the next yard. She was standing very, very still.

I heard a woman’s voice, suddenly, wafting out from the open downstairs windows of the house. “Gwendolyn? Gwennie, are you down here? Gwendolyn?” It was a mother’s voice.

Gwendolyn didn’t move, so still and tall, so much like the trees around her. She was enormous, and for the first time in so long I felt small, no bigger than a minute.

Casey was still pulling on my shirt, pointing like I hadn’t seen anything and saying, “That’s her, God, Haven, look.”

I was looking. And listening to Mrs. Rogers’s voice as it moved past one window after another, growing louder, then fading. Finally she came out on the back porch, where we could only see the top of her head over the wall, being that she was normal sized. Softly, she said, “Gwendolyn?” The top of her head moved across the yard, until it was flush with the middle of Gwendolyn’s spine. I saw a hand come up, tiny, and take one of the long, thin arms. “Let’s go in, honey, okay? Maybe you should lie down for a little while.”

Her voice was very clear and soft, the kind you hear at your bedside when you’re sick and throwing up and your mother brings cold compresses and ginger ale and oyster crackers. Mrs. Rogers rubbed her hand up and down Gwendolyn’s arm, talking now in a low voice that I couldn’t make out; but Gwendolyn didn’t move a muscle. Finally, Gwendolyn turned. I saw her face then, the same one we’d seen on all those magazine covers and on MTV. But it wasn’t the same: it wasn’t bronzed, with pink lips and lashes a mile long; no hair blowing back in the wind, framing her face; no diamonds flashing out of the wild blue of her eyes. Instead, I saw just a tall girl with a blank, plain expression, thin and angular and lost. Her cheeks were hollow and her mouth small, not luscious, more like a slit drawn hastily with a marker or a child’s crayon. I don’t know if she saw us. She was looking our way, her eyes on us, but there was no way of telling what she saw. It could have been us or the trees behind us or maybe another place or faces of other people. She only looked at us for a few moments, with that haunted, gaunt expression before her mother prodded her along and she ducked into the doorway, vanishing.

“Did you see her?” Casey was standing in their yard now, craning her head to get a look inside. “God, can you believe it? She looks horrible.”

“We should go,” I said, now aware that they could be in any of those windows, watching us. It seemed like too small a house to hold someone so big, like a doll’s house with tiny plates and newspapers.

I practically had to drag Casey down the sidewalk. She was sure Gwendolyn was going to make another appearance, or burst out the door for another hysterical walk through the neighborhood.

“Come on,” I said, then gave up trying to move her forcibly and just took off myself, much the way I always did when she was doing something that could get us both in trouble.

She came along, complaining all the way. “If we’d stayed, she might have come out and talked to us. She’s probably lonely.”

“She doesn’t even know us,” I said as we turned back onto our street. Mrs. Melvin’s flag, emblazoned with a strawberry, flapped in the breeze a few houses down. The bike gang passed again, this time in the street, yelling and shooting us the finger. They were all elementary school kids.

“She knows we feel her pain,” said Casey, who suddenly had personal insight into this herself. “I know what it feels like.”

“You do not,” I said as we came up to the Melvins’ house. “All you know is loving some dumb guy in Pennsylvania.”

“Love is love is love,” Casey said, stubborn. “We women know.”

We were passing her house anyway, so Casey stopped for the first half-hour check. Mrs. Melvin was in the kitchen, making some kind of fancy meal that required the peeling of an eggplant. Baby Ronald was at the kitchen table eating baloney slices and playing with his Star Trek action figures.

“Just to let you know I haven’t run off to Pennsylvania,” Casey said, heading straight to the fridge. The room smelled like burnt rice. I could hear Charlie Baker, news anchorman, talking about national affairs from the small TV that sat on the counter by the bananas.

“Not funny.” Mrs. Melvin put down the eggplant, which was a sickly brown color without its purple skin. “Don’t forget we have dinner at six-fifteen. It’s family night.”

Casey pulled out two cans of Diet Pepsi and made a face at me. “God, how much time do I have to spend with you guys, anyway?”

Mrs. Melvin went back to the eggplant, her mouth in that tight little line that meant she was cranky. “I’m not in the mood to answer that question.”

“Hey, baby Ronald,” I said, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from him.

He scowled, wrinkling his nose. Freckles folded in, then out. “Shut up.”

“Ronald,” Mrs. Melvin snapped. “That’s rude.”